Data Center Delerium, The Ultimate NIMBY.
The intensifying late-summer backlash against data centers is inspiring panic among some corners of the tech sector — amid fears that the industry is mishandling a political crisis that will stretch into 2028 and beyond.
Those worries have deepened in recent weeks as politicians across the political spectrum embraced various curbs on data center construction, with Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, potential Democratic White House hopeful Josh Shapiro and Michigan GOP Senate nominee Mike Rogers being among the latest to sign on.
Some tech industry advocates maintain that the public pushback against the hulking artificial intelligence hubs is a fleeting storm generated by candidates seeking wedge issues for November. Tech companies’ best course, they say, is to avoid any political dealmaking until temperatures lower after the midterms.
But others call that foolish wishful thinking.
“AI is going to be a massive issue for the presidential election in a way that technology has never been an issue,” a representative from a major AI company told POLITICO, adding: “Nobody wants to lose their job and they’re already feeling squeezed while these very, very rich people who are richer than anything we have ever seen in the history of Earth are making more. And I think people are sick and tired of that.”
The data centers look like warehouses that fuel the e-commerce age but there is a lot more technical stuff that takes place in their gray walls than in a sorting facility. The general public as adopted AI very rapidly into their daily existence but fears linger and the data centers, with their tremendous energy use, are an effective funnel for their anger and reluctance towards this newly ubiquitous technology. Large swaths of farmland are now now even more valuable as the tech giants try to amass more and more land for their innocuous looking building.
